He'd pulled over on the highway, turned to her with those blue eyes she'd once thought kind, and said, "I want children, Lena. Real children. This isn't going to work." She'd sat there in the passenger seat, winter sun making everything too bright, and felt her entire life dissolve. "We could adopt," she'd whispered.
"There are options. I'm not raising someone else's mistake. He'd put the car back in drive. I'll have my lawyer contact you. Take what you need and be out by tonight."
That was it. 6 years of marriage ended on the side of Interstate 94 with semis blasting past and Christmas music playing on the radio. Some cheerful garbage about coming home for the holidays. She didn't have a home anymore. Lena pulled her coat tighter.
It was Marcus' coat. Actually, she'd grabbed it by accident in her days, and it swallowed her whole expensive cashmere that smelled like his cologne. She should hate it. should have left it on the marble floor of his foyer, but it was warm and she had nothing else. So here she was, wrapped in the scent of the man who'd just thrown her away. A car passed, then another.
Headlights cutting through the snow like search lights there and gone. Nobody stopped. Nobody even slowed. Why would they? Just another person at a bus stop on a December night.
Nothing unusual. Nothing worth noticing. Her mother would have said this was karma, punishment for something. Her mother had been big on divine retribution before the cancer took her 5 years back. No other family left now.
No siblings. Her father had checked out before she could form memories of him. Marcus had liked that, she realized now: that she came unattached. No messy in-laws, no obligations, just Lena, grateful and alone, easy to discard. When she stopped being useful, the shaking started in her hands and worked its way up her arms.
Not cold, not entirely. This was something else. Something that started in her chest and spread like poison. Panic, maybe. Or grief, or the horrible realization that she had absolutely no idea what to do next.
She had $243 in her purse. That was it. The joint account, Marcus' account that she'd been allowed to use, was already frozen. She'd tried to withdraw cash at the ATM outside their bank, and the machine had blinked error like it was personally offended she'd attempted it. $243 in December, in a city where a decent hotel room cost more per night than she had total, a laugh bubbled up in her throat, sharp and wrong.
She swallowed it down hard. If she started laughing, she might not stop. And if she didn't stop, people would notice. And if people noticed, someone might call the police or an ambulance, and she couldn't afford either. The wind picked up again, and this time she felt it in her bones.
Her toes had stopped hurting 15 minutes ago, which probably wasn't good. She'd read somewhere that when you stopped feeling the cold, that's when you were really in trouble. When your body started shutting down the extremities to protect the core, going into survival mode. What a joke. Survival mode.